Cleopatra D IX: MS V, ff. 118-168. South English Legendary.

A fragment of an otherwise unknown manuscript of the South English Legendary.

 

Description.

Parchment, 51 ff., 265 x 165 mm with the text block 205 x 112 mm. Written in one column of 40 lines. Folios in twelves, with ff. 1-5 of the first quire lost and the final quire in eight. The last leaf is blank. Written in two hands, both Anglicana approaching textura, very clear. B is rounder with smaller strokes. A writes ff. 118-149v (John Evangelist, Thomas of Becket), B ff. 149v-166 (Theophilus/Virgin, Cecilia, Gregory). No decoration save the “traditional blue initials flourished in red with marginal extensions”, not filled in (Görlach, Textual tradition 112). All folios but the last numbered in modern foliation.

 

Contents.

The end of a manuscript of the South English Legendary, lacking at least five leaves from its first quire and probably several other quires containing a more complete collection of the poems. The South English Legendary is a popular collection of saints’ lives in vernacular verse, surviving in many manuscripts, originating in the Worcestershire/Gloucestershire region in the late thirteenth century. Görlach observes that it seems to have been confined to this region “for the first 50-80 years of its existence, spreading into the Midlands only in the second half of the 14th century” (Revision 9). The legends contained in this manuscript are (Brown 267-68):

- 118r: The final eight lines of St John the Evangelist (Him sende here his ringe a3en & þonked him also...). ½ p.

- 118r-149v: St Thomas of Canterbury, followed by his Translation (Gilberd was Thomas fader name þat trewe was & god...). 32 ff.

- 149v-155v: St Theophilus, with Miracles of the Virgin (Seint Teophle was a gret man & gret clerk also...). 7 ff.

- 155v-158v: St Cecilia (Seint Cecile of noble kinne ibore was at Rome...). 4 ff.

- 158v-166v: St Gregory (All þat beoþ in sinne i-bounde / And þencheþ godes merci to abide...). 9 ff.

 

Origin.

Görlach’s study of the dissemination and variations of the Southern English Legendary, together with the dialect and orthography of this version, led him to place it in the Gloucestershire/Oxfordshire region (Görlach, Textual tradition 112). Its acquisition by Prise may suggest a religious house in Gloucestershire, as he enacted the dissolution of many houses there and apparently none in Oxfordshire (cf. Pryce; Ker, Sir John Prise), although there is no evidence that he acquired it directly from its original location rather than from another collector.

 

Date.

Görlach judges both hands in this manuscript as belonging to the middle of the fourteenth century.

 

Later provenance and position within codex.

At some point during the sixteenth century the manuscript, or possibly its remains, fell into the hands of Sir John Prise, employed by Henry VIII during the 1530s to close down monasteries in the west of England (Ker, Sir John Prise 5). Prise’s aversion to altering or rebinding the manuscripts in his collection (ibid) suggests that it would have passed on to Cotton (presumably via one or more intermediaries) alone, unbound with any other manuscript within the codex. The gap in foliation between the previous manuscript and this, however, suggests the presence of two blank leaves, possibly used by Prise to enclose this fragile fragment to prevent the loss of further leaves (if indeed it was fragmented at this point).

While Prise may have been more concerned with the preservation of the original state of his manuscripts than many of his contemporaries, his attitude was not entirely reverent. Ker mentions the “numerous, strongly Protestant and anti-Becket” notes in Prise’s hand written in the margin by that legend: “What arrogance is this! of one that had spent his tyme more in merchandize hauking and hunting than in lernyng” (qtd. in Ker, Sir John Prise 21). Precious his books may have been to Prise, but ultimately utilitarian.

There is also the possibility that Prise may have received the manuscript intact. This is perhaps more likely: history was his subject, not the vagaries of poetic saints, and a mere fragment of such a text might have not seemed worth preserving. If, then, it passed on to Cotton as a whole and was fragmented by him (see introductory post), he may have bound it with another two leaves to distinguish it from the ‘serious’ matter of the volume, or to hold it together pending proper binding. This is another question on which the manuscriptitself could shed light, as the age and wearing of the outer leaves of the manuscript and of the sheltering leaves ought to give some clue as to how long each has spent unprotected.

 

Lacunae.

Perhaps fittingly, considering its position as the final manuscript in the codex, this manuscript’s value as a witness lies less in its contents than in its later history. The poems it contains, with minor variations, survive in more complete manuscripts and have been published several times, while their cousins and progeny live on in texts such as the Canterbury Tales and the Gilte Legende. On the other hand, its treatment at the hands of Prise (and possibly Cotton) stands with the fate of the psalter in Royal 13 D I in testimony to the likely fate of a good many such manuscripts at the hands of the Protestant antiquarians. The violence visited on the ‘body’ of this manuscript seems to evidence a need to correct and subdue a recalcitrant creature amongst the diligent, precious subjects better beloved of their keepers. As such, the mystery of its missing leaves and the firm rebukes written in its margins form an appropriate counterpart to the quiet survival of the Brief Chronicle, and to the repeated studying and reproduction of the Liber Alani de Ashbourne.

 

 

Cited.

Brown, Carleton. A Register of Middle English Romance and Didactic Verse. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1916.

Görlach, Manfred. The textual tradition of the South English Legendary. Leeds: University of Leeds, 1974.

----- An East Midland Revision of the South English Legendary: A Selection from MS C. U. L. Add. 3039. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1976.

Ker, Neil R. “Sir John Prise”, The Library 5th series 10 (1955): 1-24.

Pryce, Huw. “Prise, Sir John (Syr Siôn ap Rhys) (1501/2–1555).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford UP, 2004. 03 Dec 2009.

A study of Cleopatra D IX: Introduction.

For an earlier mention of my investigations into this manuscript, see this post. Some things mentioned in it turned out to be incorrect or were dropped from the final study because I pursued a different angle, but I’m leaving it as is.

BL Cotton Cleopatra D IX has received only intermittent scholarly attention, and that piecemeal. Here a poem has been isolated from its manuscript and published, there a list of names or saints’ lives has been analysed for its relation to other such sources. One line – and not the most reliable - from a single chronicle has repeatedly been quoted to add weight to arguments that Edward II’s relationship with Piers Gavaston was sexual, with no consideration of the source.[1] As the codex is an early seventeenth-century assembly of disparate fourteenth-century texts, it has received no consideration as an entity; and it might reasonably be argued that it ought not. The authors and scribes of the various manuscripts contained in it certainly intended no relationship to the others, and Cotton’s assembly of it has no great psychological or historical significance. Moreover, the manuscripts contained in it are generally obscure enough that there must remain serious lacunae in our comprehension of the provenance and movements of the component parts, until the moment of their combination.

However, the mysteries and tantalising clues of their histories are precisely what have the potential to inform our broader understanding of the composition and later reception of manuscripts of this type. A collection of this type provides a ready collection of facts, impressions and resulting hypotheses – all potentially mistaken but all valuable to speculate around - of circumstances, motivations and habits of composition, and simultaneously of the treatment which the manuscripts were likely to receive at the hands of the early modern antiquarians.

Combined and bound by Cotton around 1616, the volume contains three large manuscripts (the Liber Alani de Ashbourne, the Epistola and the South English Legendary fragment), between which are bound two briefer manuscripts (a brief chronicle from Gloucestershire and the Fineshade chronicle collection). There is a considerable degree of order and intent in the collection and arrangement of the manuscripts in the volume, but it remains a superficial imposition. This volume was one of many assembled by Cotton from similar manuscripts in the mid 1610s, and as such is part of a larger project in which page size and number of folios seem also to have been a weighty consideration.

The codex begins with what Cotton probably considered the most valuable or useful of the book: the Fineshade collection was borrowed by Archbishop Bancroft in 1608 and consulted by John Selden c. 1617 (Tite 45 & 215), and before it fell into his possession had been copied and incorporated into other histories of the bishopric and the county. The first four manuscripts are reasonable uniform in size and nature, as well as appearance and layout if Brereton’s error is indicative (see later entry on the Liber Alani de Ashbourne). There is some thematic continuity, also, between the concerns of the Fineshade chronicler and William of Pagula’s reproaches against Edward III’s governance (mss III-IV). All are products of fourteenth-century England, although there is a possibility that the Epistola (ms IV) was copied in Gascony, and Cotton appears to have gone to some effort to arrange them into chronological order, which would require more than a passing glance at their contents.

The fifth manuscript, a fragment of the South English Legendary, stands out: popular culture, non-historical (at least to post-Reformation eyes), highly Catholic, middle English and clearly incomplete, the only elements in common with its companions seem to be its size and date.

A possible clue to its inclusion can be found in the original fly-leaves of the volume as Cotton bound it. Until 1913, the codex had fly-leaves formed of two leaves from a fourteenth-century psalter. The same psalter was also cannibalised for binding material for at least twenty-five other newly assembled Cotton volumes c. 1615-1618, most of which what appear from Planta’s catalogue to be similar historical collections, often local or monastic. Carley and Tite document this fragmentation, and have concluded that the remaining bulk of the psalter, which was bound into what is now Royal 13 D I, was intended by Cotton simply as filler after he removed something else from that volume (97 &c). The psalter has now been reunited with its missing leaves, rebound in 1913 as Royal 13 D I*, but its traces leave a useful record of Cotton’s activities in the mid 1610s.

As demonstrated by his treatment of the psalter, Cotton’s approach to his library was utilitarian rather than reverential, and he frequently fragmented or rebound manuscripts according to convenience of consultation. Sharpe observes that items “were bound together that were often consulted together” (69). This codex seems only to half embody that impulse: the first four booklets can all be described as fourteenth-century local histories with a broader political view, but the South English Legendary fragment stands alone. Perhaps it was added, being an appropriate size, simply to complete the bulk of the volume for binding, as with the psalter in Royal 13 D I. If this was the motive, we cannot exclude the possibility that Cotton himself is responsible for dismembering the complete South English Legendary manuscript as he did the psalter: they are, after all, both overtly Catholic texts with little of interest to offer Cotton’s generation of antiquaries. Perhaps we ought to seek its missing leaves in the pastedowns and fly-leaves of other Cotton volumes.

Individually and as a group, from a literary perspective or a codicological, there are difficulties with using the contents of Cleopatra D IX as a historical source. The scope of vision of each is local and limited, and much of the information unique to these manuscripts can’t be relied upon unless verified from other sources. Similarly, there are simply too many lacunae to construct a firm picture of their composition, transmission, later history and collection, so they serve as a definite historical example neither for their own time nor for Cotton’s. On the other hand, there are benefits to using texts like these as a historical source. I do not mean the more mundane benefits that Haskins points to when he praises the Fineshade chronicle’s ability to augment and correct another manuscript’s list of the dead and punished after the Battle of Boroughbridge in 1322 (Haskins, “Chronicle” 74-75). This sort of information-gathering has its place, of course, but only as it helps us understand more broadly the human and cultural implications behind the development of these manuscripts.

For example, the multiple layers of composition and contribution evident in each of the first three manuscripts provide a valuable example of the dangers of applying modern assumptions to a term like “author”. The presence of Des Grantz Geanz in the Liber Alani de Ashbourne, meanwhile, performs a similar service for the term “historical”.

In addition, comparison with other similar manuscripts could also provide the grounds for a detailed and powerful study of the motivations behind much of the historical writing of this period. Edward II’s reign, with its natural and civil upheavals and perceived perversions of the natural order upon which society was built, seems to have prompted a flurry of chronicles and other similar documents, suggesting a widely-felt need both to record momentous events to impose some imaginative order on them. While these manuscripts seem to belong, to varying degrees, to that tradition, they also give us a glimpse of a flurry of possible personal motivations informing the writing, from duty to the local parish to displacement from home, from higher instruction to memories of the dead.

The information gathered in the entries to follow is of necessity incomplete, even beyond the true lacunae imposed by time and obscurity. Only one page of the manuscript has been sighted in its assembly – f. 87v, reproduced in the appendix below. The remainder of the information is collected and deduced from the attentions of other scholars, some of whose interests lay in very different directions to my intent. For example, William of Pagula’s Epistola has received a respectable amount of attention, and much is now known about the circumstances, motivation and dating of its composition; but not one description of this manuscript is to be found. Brereton has published Des Grantz Geanz, from the Liber Alani de Ashbourne, but commenting on the contents of the other sections of the manuscript is out of her purview. This information, then, is incomplete, and many gaps could be filled by a simple trip to the British Library.

It should be also noted that in its assembly, I have deliberately engaged in speculation. Many hypotheses have had to be revised as new evidence came to light, and doubtless as many of the remainder would be proved incorrect if only all the information guessed at were available to us. I make no apology for it, however: the exercise of speculation in considering a collection such as this must be an end in itself, opening up possibilities and raising valuable questions about the individuals involved and the push and pull of cultural motivations in play, about what they believed they were doing in the act of writing, whom they thought they were serving and how, what “history” meant to each and how the community around them interacted with their text. The caveat remains, of course, that such speculation is only valuable – only safe – so long as one never forgets where it begins, and where it must end.

[1] “Quem filius regis intuens in eum / tantum protinus amorem iniecit quod cum eo firmitatis fedus iniit, et pre ceteris morta- / -libus indissolubile dileccionis vinculum secum elegit et firmiter disposuit innodare” (f. 86r, qtd. in Haskins, “Chronicle” 75), usually translated with varying degrees of luridness that occasionally almost match the Latin. References are typically to Haskins, occasionally mentioning the codex by pressmark. (See my previous post).

Cited:

Brereton, Georgine E. (ed). Des grantz geanz: An Anglo-Norman poem. Oxford: Medium Ævum 1937.
Carley, James P. & Colin G. C. Tite. “Sir Robert Cotton as collector of manuscripts and the question of dismemberment: British Library MSS Royal 13 D. I and Cotton Otho D. VIII.” The Library 6th series 14 (1992): 94-99.
Haskins, G. L. “Chronicle of the Civil Wars of Edward II.” Speculum. 14 (1939): 73-81.
Planta, Joseph. Catalogue of the manuscripts in the Cottonian Library deposited in the British Museum. The British Museum: Department of Manuscripts. London: Hansard, 1802.
Sharpe, Kevin. Sir Robert Cotton 1586-1631: History and Politics in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979.
Tite, Colin. The Early Records of Sir Robert Cotton’s Library: Formation, Cataloguing, Use. The British Library. Bury St Edmund’s: St Edmundsbury Press, 2003.

Muddling a manuscript

So, in an attempt to get all this information straight in my head, I’m going to do a blog post about it.

I’m trying to reconstruct a reasonably thorough codicological description of Cotton Cleopatra D IX, a codex which is an early modern collection of three, five, seven or eight 14th century mss (depending on how you count). It is, by the way, the codex that includes the short monastic chronicle of the civil wars of Edward II which I was translating [??] a while back. There’s a lot of missing information, much of it simply lost to time but a frustrating amount which could be resolved by looking at the codex. Or if any of the scholars who have, over the past century, commented on various articles within the codex had bothered giving trivial details about things like, oh, size of the page, or which pages are more worn than others, or whether the titles given to various entries are in a contemporary hand or an early modern one, or in fact only exist in the catalogue, and trifling little details like that. The most recent catalogue for the Cotton mss was published in 1802, and it’s rather cursory. I hear there’s another catalogue in process, due to be completed at the end of 2009, so this post may be rendered obsolete or proved inaccurate in several points within a few months – here’s hoping!

In brief, the main five manuscripts:

- a collection of historical writing from the Benedictine abbey of Lichfield,

- a brief chronicle from 1066-1314 from Gloucester or thereabouts,

- a chronicle with supporting documents relating to the events of 1322 and their aftermath from the Augustinian priory of Fineshade,

- a treatise of advice (speculum) to Edward III on the bad management of the kingdom,

- a fragment of a few saints’ lives from the South English Legendary, probably from the 1340s, somewhere around Gloucestershire or Oxfordshire.

We can call it six if we include the two leaves from a 14C service book which help to bind the codex as a while; seven if we count the single leaf attached to the Fineshade chronicle which appears to be an official proclamation from 1325; and, at a stretch, eight, if we count the two (almost) blank leaves binding the South English Legendary section.

So there is a certain thematic and temporal coherence, particularly if one considers the saints’ lives as historical sources on much the same footing as the other documents (as most people in this period would). The trouble is that they weren’t assembled in the 1300s – there’s no reason to think that the two whose origin we can pinpoint left Fineshade and Lichfield before they were dissolved by Henry VIII (1536 and 1538 respectively). And yet the Speculum Edwardi III is written on paper. It must have been kept very, very carefully to still be legible even by the 1500s, never mind by 2009, and I find it very hard to believe that it wasn’t bound up with other (parchment) mss very early to have survived at all. There is also thematic continuity between the Speculum and the concerns of the Fineshade chronicler in the manuscript immediately preceding it, though that may be just coincidence; but the ordering of the first four mss suggests a very careful grouping and consideration and knowledge of contents (and the historical events to which they refer), managing to approximate a chronological order for a chronologically complex group of texts. And yet, this care for the text is not reflected in the vandalism of a service book to bind them - unless it’s specifically a care for the text, not the manuscript? Or the binder had plenty of service books at his disposal (post-dissolution, presumably) and considered them far too ornate and popish (and common) to be worthy of the respect accorded to these more unique documents? Or were these four mss grouped by one person, and later bound together with the SEL fragment by another?

I’ll throw in a name at this point – Sir John Price, originally Ap Rhys (born in Wales, but built up quite a career in London before retiring to Herefordshire). He was heavily involved in the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s, gathered an extensive personal library from their collections, and we know that he had at least the SEL fragment in his possession. Possibly he was the one to bind it with the two folios that surround it in the codex: we know he was opposed to rebinding volumes that were already bound, and we owe the preservation of many fine 11C volumes to his opinions in that regard. However, the SEL fragment was already broken up and had lost many leaves already (we don’t know how many because every collection of the SEL is different, so there’s no way of knowing how many legends this ms originally contained), and both the first and the last leaves extant are damaged. Preservation, in this case, would have meant protection rather than his usual more hands-off approach.

He would not, however, have been the man to bind the ms together with the other four. He may have owned them all – at least the first three of the five seem to be monastic in origin – but unfortunately the monasteries that we can identify as dissolved by Price are all concentrated around the Welsh border (Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, Shropshire, Worcestershire). The brief chronicle from around Gloucestershire might have fallen into his hands, but he would be venturing rather afield to reach Lichfield in Staffordshire, and Fineshade (Northamptonshire) would seem to be far outside his purview. So it’s more probable that either he acquired them later, or that when his library was broken up at his death a friend with similar interests acquired those mss Price had, and this other collector combined them with one or more of his own collection to form the codex we have now. This other collector may have been Cotton – does anyone know how likely Cotton would have been to bind this sort of collection together? – but it may also have been someone else from whom Cotton later acquired this volume as it now stands.

So that’s a simple overview of what we know about the later history of the mss in Cotton Cleopatra D IX – more questions than answers. The whole codex in itself presents (or in some cases, tries to obscure) an interesting story, or set of questions, about the production and dissemination and collection of manuscripts from the fourteenth century onwards. It is, after all, essentially a collection of collections, or possibly a collection of collections of collections. I still have no firm answers to almost anything about this book, and all the visible trails are broken at least once or consist of nothing more than a single point. But we have enough that we can see the broad strokes of the picture, and a few random finer ones that don’t really make up anything comprehensible, but which allow us to consider the more human aspects behind inspiration, purpose, production, retention, collection, in ways that may not answer any questions definitely, but at least give us plenty of other interesting and more germane questions to consider.

Papist, Protestant or Puritan?

This quote started me musing:

"The word Puritan is an essential engine [of the attempt to push English religion towards conformation with Rome] ... For this word in the mouth of a drunkard doth mean a sober man, in the mouth of an Arminian, an Orthodox man, in the mouth of a papist, a Protestant. And so it is spoke to shame a man out of all religion, if a man be ashamed to be saved."
Francis Rous, in an address to the Short Parliament of 1640.[1]

We all know words like this, of course - words whose precise meaning is inexact, but whose employment would make anyone scurry to be on the opposite side. Vague enough to mean whatever you want it to mean, you just know that you don't want to identify yourself as one. Very useful in times of national stress, these words are often used to create a sense of 'other' to define a more cohesive 'us' - or, of course, to isolate rivals in the school playground. The word 'Puritan' was (almost) always applied to someone else, some other group - either to define a general, non-specific group against whom we can identify us, or to villify a specific person or challenge that needed to be discredited or attacked.

But wasn't this exactly what 'papist' was used for in the century leading up to the civil war? How do you discard an entire belief system at once? You don't, of course - you cling to some parts of it and gradually work out which bits you want to maintain, as a community - but you don't work as a community, you work as a set of individuals, pulled back and forth by individual preferences and the cacophany of different voices and conflicting systems flying about the place from different parts of Europe. And the printing press, of course, increased exponentially the number of voices that could be heard. So if a country is coming gradually to define our kind of Protestantism, it has to do so while taking all these voices into account, choosing which to listen to. And there is virulent argument, of course, and a word like 'papist' can be applied to whatever you choose to associate with the wrong-headed old way of doing things - vestments, ceremony, ideas about methods of salvation, or, if you're so inclined, anything that does not conform with the most strict ideas of predestination. Your path is defined by away - true godliness is to move away from papism, rather than any clear towards.

But you can only go in one direction for so long. No one wants to live absolutely without ceremony or tradition (certainly not Charles I), and eventually you do need some kind of power hierarchy in the church. And you will never persuade an entire population to live permanently in a state of personal ethical purity, rather than just going along to the ceremony once a week and living fairly normally the rest of the time. So you set up a limit in that direction too - the Puritan, an idea to be regarded with almost as much revulsion as the papist. Perhaps more - after all, at least initially, it's closer to home, and you run more risk of attracting the same accusation yourself, until you work out just what it is and move away from that label too.

And now your identity rests somewhere in between, defining yourself as definitely-not-Puritan and definitely-not-papist as the need arises, and applying the closest word to anything inappropriate that comes along which you ferociously do not want to be us.


[1] Esther S. Cope and Willson H. Coates (eds), Proceedings of the Short Parliament of 1640, Camden 4th series 19 (London 1977), 147. Cited in Michael Braddick, God's fury, England's fire: A new history of the civil wars (London: Penguin, 2008), 49.